The 13th Software Quality Days (SWQD) conference and tools fair – one of the largest software quality conferences in Europe - will bring together researchers and practitioners from business, industry, and academia working on quality assurance and quality management for software engineering and information technology.

In 2021 the SWQD conference hosts the 10th scientific program on research and industry experience. The guiding topic for 2021 will be “Future Perspectives on Software Engineering Quality”

++ MAIN SCIENTIFIC PROGRAM ++

High software and systems quality are success-critical factors in engineering practices and refer to product, process, and service quality. However, quality attributes have to be embodied within individual phases of software and systems development.

In distributed engineering environments, where various stakeholders coming from heterogeneous disciplines have to collaborate and interact efficiently. Additional quality attributes with focus on collaboration and data exchange apply. Mobile environments typically refer to product quality and include quality requirements regarding usability, interaction, safety and security. Emerging trends in the area of Big Data can focus on various quality aspects such as (a) how to embody and assure quality in Big Data application or (b) how to use Big Data in context of quality assurance activities such as testing.

Following the guiding topic we welcome contributions related to software and systems quality in context of distributed and mobile environments.

Topics of interest for research and industrial experience paper include but are not limited to

Developing software prototypes in the scope of research projects is not a standard engineering task since they are targeted at exploring and evaluating innovative approaches and provide initial implementations of novel features. Therefore, such prototypes often have initial quality issues that must be overcome in order to transfer the research results into industry.

Besides technical challenges, the teamwork and interaction of different partners within research projects play an important role as there are multiple ways on how to shape collaborations. In the workshop on academia and industry collaborations, we aim at discussing experiences, best practices, and lessons learned in such environments.

Topics of interest for this workshop focus on (but are not limited to):
+ Challenges in Academia-Industry collaborations,
+ processes, methods and tools for transferring research prototypes into industry,
+ experience reports, and
+ success stories and lessons learned.

Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially in machine learning and deep learning, and their integration into software-based systems of all domains raises new challenges to engineering modern AI-based systems. These systems are data-intensive, continuously evolving, and self-adapting, which leads to new constructive and analytical quality assurance approaches to guarantee their quality during development and operation in live environments. On the constructive side, for instance, new process models, requirements engineering approaches or continuous integration and deployment models are needed. On the analytical side, for instance, new data, offline and online testing approaches are needed for AI-based systems.

In this workshop, we discuss visions, novel approaches, experiences and challenges of constructive and analytical quality assurance of AI-based systems.

MAIN SCIENTIFIC PROGRAM. The scientific program of SWQD 2021 accepts two categories of conference submissions: Technical Research papers and Industry Experience Papers. In both categories, papers with practical relevance and already conducted practical evaluation will be preferred.
The main scientific programm of the SWQD 2021 conference will provide best paper awards in both categories, i.e., technical research papers and industrial experience papers.

WORKSHOP ON ACADEMIA-INDUSTRY COLLABORATION (WAICol). The workshop on academia/industry collaboration program of SWQD 2021 accepts one category of workshop submissions. Experience Reports should describe experiences in transferring research results from academia into industrial applications or productive operations (including, but not limited to reports on best practices on development processes and quality management for scientific software that reasonably balance sustainability and flexibility). Experiences can be of different types such as recurring technical challenges and challenges between academic and industrial partners from a collaborative and organizational perspective. The authors should contribute to practice by addressing researchers as well as practitioners and discuss success factors or lessons learned. The organizers explicitly also encourage reports that discuss and analyze negative results.

WORKSHOP ON QUALITY ASSURANCE FOR AI (QAAI). The workshop on quality assurance for AI technologies accepts one category of workshop submission.
+ Vision or Concept Papers should present visionary or conceptual ideas for quality assurance of AI-based systems. Concept papers should illustrate the discussed approaches by examples or preliminary evaluations.
+ Experience or Challenge Papers should describe experiences in applying quality assurance for AI-based systems or open challenges in quality assurance for AI-based systems. The author(s) should properly frame the experiences or challenges so that other researchers and/or practitioners can benefit and base their work on the paper.

++ PUPLICATION OF PAPERS WITH SPRINGER LNBIP ++

MAIN SCIENTIFIC PROGRAM.
The scientific program papers will be rigorously peer-reviewed for publication in the well known research publication series Springer LNBIP.
+ Full papers should be 15-20 pages (in Springer LNBIP proceedings format) and include an abstract of up to 150 words.
+ Short Papers should be 8-12 pages (in Springer LNBIP proceedings format - see the LNBIP Website for author instructions).

WORKSHOP PAPERS
+ Workshop papers will be published in a dedicated section related to the workshop of the proceedings and should be 4-8 pages (in Springer LNBIP proceedings format).

The language of the scientific program is English.

All scientific program contributions will be reviewed by the international Program Committee on their scientific merit and relevance to the conference topics and may be accepted as regular or short papers. Accepted papers will be included in the proceedings, published by Springer LNBIP (abstracted/ indexed in ISI Proceedings, DBLP, EI and Scopus), and the Springer Digital library.

If accepted, papers must be personally presented at the Software Quality Days 2021 Conference by the author or one of the co-authors. The first presenting author can participate free of charge at the two conference days. Additional authors/presenters can participate at discounted partner fee.